Pages

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

I grew up on John Hughes films, liking and relating to some more than others. I vividly remember watching Sixteen Candles on TV (I'd already seen it at the theater so I knew what all the bleeped out language was) and my dad walking into the room, pausing to watch a scene, and then commenting that if I used that kind of language (apparently he didn't have to see it in the theater to know what Molly Ringwald's character said) they'd forget my birthday too. Obviously Hughes was not the voice of my parents' generation. But in many ways, he was of mine. As much as I can still connect many of his movies to specific moments in my life, I would never have thought to write either a memoir about him or a memoir about the impact his movies had on my life as Jason Diamond did. That the book was originally conceived as the first but then became very much the second made it just that much more interesting to this fellow movie watcher.

Diamond grew up in the Chicago suburbs that Hughes immortalized in his movies at the very time that Hughes was capturing them. Diamond identified with these movies and the man who made them, using them and music as an escape from his own very unhappy childhood and adolescence. John Hughes excelled at capturing teen angst. It seems it was this feeling above all others that resonated with Diamond, although given his estrangement from his abusive and neglectful parents and his eventual homelessness while still in high school, he wasn't actually facing the sort of angst that Hughes' characters face, instead he was facing true and deep problems. But the movies' generally positive (hard to call them happy in some cases) endings, gave Diamond hope in what was otherwise a rather hopeless situation. Diamond struggled to define himself outside of his parents' negative and brutal definition of him so he uses certain of Hughes' characters to try and make sense of who he is throughout the pages of this memoir.

After escaping his unhappy history in Chicago, Diamond moves to New York where he finds a succession of low paying, easily replaceable jobs. He is still adrift and ashamed of his life when discussions with friends and a reading by a medium encourages him to tackle a comprehensive, unauthorized biography of John Hughes. Chasing after his dream of writing a book, researching the pop culture icon, trying unsuccessfully to interview those who worked with Hughes, and making a deep dive into the movies consumed years of Diamond's life. Even immersed in this project, Diamond still struggled but the project allowed him the chance to recount and accept his past on the way to a better and happier life.

This memoir is not so much about John Hughes. It is very much about Jason Diamond. It is personal and hard and what he lived through is dark and depressing. Insecurity and self doubt wind through his terrible teen years and on into his twenties. The small hope of Hughes' movie endings seems to be beyond his reach so very often but somehow, even so, those movies pull him through. The memoir is very introspective and some of Diamond's drifting is hard to read. It's tough to stay with an author who is so unhappy and filled with shame and anger but his recounting of his early life certainly explains why he is trapped in this place. I'm not sure how relatable the book would be to someone not of his generation but for those of us who grew up in the John Hughes era as Diamond did, this will strike a chord for sure.

Amazon says this about the book: An irresistible, incisive, fast-paced comedic drama about a family who reunites after the death of its patriarch, just as a hurricane tears through town. For fans of Jonathan Tropper, Emma Straub, and Karen Joy Fowler.

On the night of a massive, record-breaking hurricane, George Westfall, an upstate New York antique store owner and father of three, lays dying. As his wife Ana seals up the storefront, their adult son Armie hides from the outside world as he always does, immersed in woodwork and thoughts of the past. In New York City, Armie’s older brother Josef, a sex-addicted techie, is fighting to repair his broken relationship with his daughters. And out in Los Angeles their sister Charlie’s career as a Hollywood publicist is crumbling.

For the Westfalls, Murphy’s Law is in full effect. Their patriarch dies as the storm hits town, flooding the store and ruining Josef’s business negotiations. Charlie is desperately trying to set a movie starlet straight, while handling her son’s expulsion from preschool and her wayward husband. And Armie, who’s still in love with his high school crush Audrey, can’t even muster the courage to leave his childhood home. Only when the children reunite to sell their father’s beloved heirloom painting do they discover their real fortune lies elsewhere.

A rollicking tableau of family life in all its messy complexity, like the best of Meg Wolitzer and Tom Perrotta, The Antiques is hilarious, heartbreaking, nimble, and observant. Complete with deeply flawed, affectionately rendered characters and an irresistible plot, Kris D’Agostino’s unforgettable novel is about the unexpected epiphanies that emerge in chaos, and the loved ones who help show us who we really are.

Monday, November 28, 2016

Under the Influence by Joyce Maynard
A Different Kind of Daughter by Maria Toorpakai
Searching for John Hughes by Jason Diamond
Naked at Lunch by Mark Haskell Smith

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
The Edge of Lost by Kristina McMorris
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Roughneck Grace by Michael Perry
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

One Perfect Summer by Paige Toon
The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth
The Sisters of Versailles by Sally Christie
The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel by Maureen Lindley
Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Forsaken by Ross Howell Jr.
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
The Spice Box Letters by Eve Makis
Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser
Specimen by Irina Kovalyova
One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Telling by Zoe Zolbrod
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
The Boy Who Speaks in Numbers by Mike Masilamani
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick
What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
After the Dam by Amy Hassinger
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Umami by Laia Jufresa
The Education of a Poker Player by James McManus
Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse
Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Remarkable by Dinah Cox
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
The Inland Sea by Donald Ritchie
The Unseen World by Liz Moore
The Silver Spoon by Kansuke Naka
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine by Alex Brunkhorst
The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith
The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter
The Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Bottomland by Michelle Hoover
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison
The Lake by Perrine Leblanc
Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
A Girl From Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
If You Left by Ashley Norton
The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller
And Again by Jessica Chiarella
Man by Kim Thuy
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood
The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora
A Good American by Alex George
Bertrand Court by Michelle Brafman
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
The Winter War by Philip Teir
This Side of Providence by Sally M. Harper
Lost and Found by Brooke Davis
Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya
300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan
The Tsar of Love of Techno by Anthony Marra
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden
Hey Harry, Hey Matilda by Rachel Hulin
The Measure of Darkness by Liam Durcan
Finding Fraser by KC Dyer
A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold
The Drone Eats With Me by Atef Abu Saif
Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh
Moo by Sharon Creech
Dear Reader by Paul Fournel
Hotel Angeline by 36 authors
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old by Anonymous
Xenophobe's Guide to the English by Antony Miall and David Milsted
No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman
Lord Roworth's Reward by Carola Dunn
Violation by Sallie Tisdale
Fall of Poppies by a collection of authors
A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner
Sitting in Bars With Cake by Audrey Schulman
Plus One by Christopher Noxon
Aunt Dimity and the Summer King by Nancy Atherton
The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday by Debbie Graber
Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell
An Improper Arrangement by Kasey Michaels
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
Riverine by Angela Palm
Gold Fever by Steve Boggan
I Will Find You by Joanna Connors
A Shoe Addict's Christmas by Beth Harbison
You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
Hollywood Is a Lot Like High School With Money by Zoey Dean
Disaster Falls by Stephane Gerson
The Last Girlfriend on Earth by Simon Rich
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Birds, Beasts, and Relatives by Gerald Durrell
Soft in the Head by Marie-Sabine Roger
The Last Chance Christmas Ball by Putney, Beverley, Bourne, Rice, Cornick, Elliott, Gracie, and King
A Different Kind of Daughter by Maria Toorpakai
Searching for John Hughes by Jason Diamond
Naked at Lunch by Mark Haskell Smith

Amazon says this about the book: For fans of The Nanny Diaries and Sophie Kinsella comes a whip-smart and deliciously funny debut novel about Kate, a young woman unexpectedly thrust into the cutthroat world of New York City private school admissions as she attempts to understand city life, human nature, and falling in love.

Despite her innate ambition and Summa Cum Laude smarts, Kate Pearson has turned into a major slacker. After being unceremoniously dumped by her handsome, French “almost fiancé,” she abandons her grad school plans and instead spends her days lolling on the couch, watching reruns of Sex and the City, and leaving her apartment only when a dog-walking gig demands it. Her friends don’t know what to do other than pass tissues and hope for a comeback, while her practical sister, Angela, pushes every remedy she can think of, from trapeze class to therapy to job interviews.

Miraculously, and for reasons no one (least of all Kate) understands, she manages to land a job in the admissions department at the prestigious Hudson Day School. In her new position, Kate learns there’s no time for self-pity or nonsense during the height of the admissions season, or what her colleagues refer to as “the dark time.” As the process revs up, Kate meets smart kids who are unlikable, likeable kids who aren’t very smart, and Park Avenue parents who refuse to take no for an answer.

Meanwhile, Kate’s sister and her closest friends find themselves keeping secrets, hiding boyfriends, dropping bombshells, and fighting each other on how to keep Kate on her feet. On top of it all, her cranky, oddly charming, and irritatingly handsome downstairs neighbor is more than he seems. Through every dishy, page-turning twist, it seems that one person’s happiness leads to another’s misfortune, and suddenly everyone, including Kate, is looking for a way to turn rejection on its head, using any means necessary—including the truly unexpected.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Have you ever met someone who was completely seductive? I don't mean that in a sexual way either. There are some people in this world who draw you in, sometimes positively but just as often negatively. They have a charisma that convinces you that you've discovered a gem in them, a new immediate best friend, someone you want to spend as much time as possible with, someone who makes you feel special and valued. I have met a few people like this in my life and there's nothing like the feeling of being taken into their inner ring. But sometimes occupying that space comes with a cost you couldn't predict in the first flush of enraptured friendship. Joyce Maynard's most recent novel, Under the Influence, details not only the spellbinding relationship but also what happens when a character opens her eyes to the actual people by whom she is so enchanted.

Helen's drinking destroyed the life she'd built for herself. It lost her custody of her son, the only bright spot she has in an otherwise lonely life. Devastated by losing Ollie, Helen works on improving herself in hopes that she'll eventually get her boy back. She attends AA faithfully and has stayed sober for years. She works as a school portrait photographer and moonlights as a server for a catering company. She goes on occasional dates from Match.com but there's no one special in her life. She's got one friend who she counts on every now and then but she's mainly alone, her father having never been in her life and her mother being an indifferent and unmaternal alcoholic herself. When Helen meets a lovely woman named Ava Havilland at an art benefit where Helen is a server and Ava is buying art, Helen is completely enchanted. Telling Ava that she herself is a photographer, even if she hasn't shot anything but school pictures in forever, the two strike up the beginnings of an almost obsessive (on Helen's part) friendship. Helen becomes a frequent visitor to the Havilland home and feels as if she is almost a member of the family, adopted by this captivating woman and her magnetic and charismatic husband, Swift. She starts to do them small favors as friends do for each other and they in turn enfold her into their fabulously, wealthy wonderland life.

Helen shares the heartbreaks of her life with Ava even though she gets little similar information in return. She is dazzled by the Havillands and the near perfection of their life. Just about the time Helen meets a quiet, loyal, and unassuming man named Elliott, she is given some expanded access to Ollie by her ex-husband and she folds her son easily into her life with Ava and Swift. Eight year old Ollie is as enchanted by them as she is, maybe even more so. Elliott, on the other hand, is not so taken with them. In fact, as an accountant he is really only curious about the new nonprofit called BARK they are creating to spay and neuter pets all over the country. The Havillands don't take to Elliott either, dubbing him a bean counter and damning him with faint praise. Helen is torn, especially when her best chance of regaining custody of Ollie might be with support from Swift and Ava.

Told from the perspective of years after the fact and narrated by a more self-aware Helen, it is immediately obvious that something has caused a rift between Helen and the Havillands but it takes most of the novel to find out just what that is. There are occasional interjections by present day Helen into her narration of the unfolding past that offer a hint at her feelings now and what she feels she should have recognized back then. These interjections serve to keep the reader alert to the undercurrents swirling through the narration and elevate the narrative tension quite effectively. Maynard has drawn Helen very convincingly as a woman who craves validation from others and is vulnerable in this need. Helen's own story-telling abilities don't protect her from falling under the influence of others and in fact make her inability to see people as they truly are sad. Helen is truly under the influence, first of alcohol and then, more importantly, of the power and allure of the Havillands. Used to having her life dictated to her by others, she fails to see the real place she occupies in the Havilland solar system and it will take a truly shocking incident to open her eyes. This said, she herself is not an entirely likable character, making terrible choices and allowing herself to be blinded the way she is. Swift and Ava are glittering, brittle characters whose kindnesses are undercut by something a little sinister, a little condescending, a little disturbing. And so the story is brilliantly set. The novel is both an indictment of the moneyed who wield their bank books as weapons and a look at the power of finally directing your own life and having the courage to rescue yourself. It is well written and suspenseful and the reader will fall under its spell just as truly as Helen fell under Swift and Ava's.

Monday, November 21, 2016

The Last Girlfriend on Earth by Simon Rich
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Birds, Beasts, and Relatives by Gerald Durrell
Soft in the Head by Marie-Sabine Roger
The Last Chance Christmas Ball by Putney, Beverley, Bourne, Rice, Cornick, Elliott, Gracie, and King

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
The Edge of Lost by Kristina McMorris
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Different Kind of Daughter by Maria Toorpakai
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Roughneck Grace by Michael Perry
Under the Influence by Joyce Maynard

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

One Perfect Summer by Paige Toon
The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth
The Sisters of Versailles by Sally Christie
The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel by Maureen Lindley
Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Forsaken by Ross Howell Jr.
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
The Spice Box Letters by Eve Makis
Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser
Specimen by Irina Kovalyova
One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Telling by Zoe Zolbrod
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
The Boy Who Speaks in Numbers by Mike Masilamani
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick
What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
After the Dam by Amy Hassinger
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Umami by Laia Jufresa
The Education of a Poker Player by James McManus
Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse
Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Remarkable by Dinah Cox
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
The Inland Sea by Donald Ritchie
The Unseen World by Liz Moore
The Silver Spoon by Kansuke Naka
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine by Alex Brunkhorst
The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith
The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter
The Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Bottomland by Michelle Hoover
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison
The Lake by Perrine Leblanc
Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
A Girl From Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
If You Left by Ashley Norton
The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller
And Again by Jessica Chiarella
Man by Kim Thuy
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood
The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora
A Good American by Alex George
Bertrand Court by Michelle Brafman
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
The Winter War by Philip Teir
This Side of Providence by Sally M. Harper
Lost and Found by Brooke Davis
Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya
300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan
The Tsar of Love of Techno by Anthony Marra
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden
Hey Harry, Hey Matilda by Rachel Hulin
The Measure of Darkness by Liam Durcan
Finding Fraser by KC Dyer
A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold
The Drone Eats With Me by Atef Abu Saif
Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh
Moo by Sharon Creech
Dear Reader by Paul Fournel
Hotel Angeline by 36 authors
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old by Anonymous
Xenophobe's Guide to the English by Antony Miall and David Milsted
No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman
Lord Roworth's Reward by Carola Dunn
Violation by Sallie Tisdale
Fall of Poppies by a collection of authors
A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner
Sitting in Bars With Cake by Audrey Schulman
Plus One by Christopher Noxon
Aunt Dimity and the Summer King by Nancy Atherton
The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday by Debbie Graber
Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell
An Improper Arrangement by Kasey Michaels
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
Riverine by Angela Palm
Gold Fever by Steve Boggan
I Will Find You by Joanna Connors
A Shoe Addict's Christmas by Beth Harbison
You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
Hollywood Is a Lot Like High School With Money by Zoey Dean
Disaster Falls by Stephane Gerson
The Last Girlfriend on Earth by Simon Rich
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Birds, Beasts, and Relatives by Gerald Durrell
Soft in the Head by Marie-Sabine Roger
The Last Chance Christmas Ball by Putney, Beverley, Bourne, Rice, Cornick, Elliott, Gracie, and King

Sunday, November 20, 2016

I have a ridiculous number of books sitting on my bedside table and it is a little overwhelming sometimes to look at them and decide which one to pick up next. Rather than reshelving all of these to clear the bedside table, I thought I'd try another way to decide which to pick up next. I'm going to type out the first lines of each of them, without sharing what the book title and author are, and ask all of you to tell me based on this very limited information which one you'd pick up. And if no one shares their choice, I'll have my kids pick for me, at least until the stacks are back to manageable levels. So here are the options:

1. I miss the pigs.

2. God made clay; the clay made men; the men made war.

3. They send girls like me to the crazy house--or simply stone us to death.

4. I started out in life under a Communist leader and a Hollywood name.

5. "Shahaab, is this you?"

6. I want to live forever...

7. All around us, they descended for one last brilliant summer hurrah.

10. Sofia dropped her gym bag in the entryway and one soccer shoe fell out, streaked with a bright green grass stain from sliding past a defensive player.

11. The boy is standing in the doorway again.

12. Eliza spies the slim piece of card stock turned facedown in the mire, a perfectly formed rectangle lying on top of the slurry of mud and dung.

13. When he found out his wife was unfaithful, Hector Castillo told his son to get in the car because they were going fishing.

14. It isn't what you know or don't know: it's what you allow yourself to know.

15. The rain was heavy now and the hem of her dress was splattered with mud.

16. Bill Blair received his discharge from the navy on a September morning in 1954.

17. November has settled over Norrkoping, the town has been shrouded in mist all through the fall.

18. Pauline stopped to adjust her sweatpants as the other kids made their way out of dress rehearsal.

19. How is it possible to bring order out of memory?

So do any of these really jump out at you? I have to read a book for review first (It was late November, and for a week solid the rain hadn't let up.) but then I want to move on to one of these. Help me decide!

So far this week, my reading travels have taken me through some bonkers short stories about love. I watched as a young woman faced the truth about when her sister went away and the impact that had on her and the rest of her family. I went back to Corfu to potter around in the fantastic Durrell family again as their adventures on the island continued. I watched as a intellectually challenged man made friends with an elderly woman on a park bench. And I read through several couples' stories as they came together and found love at a Regency ball. Where did your reading travels take you this past week? And don't forget to weigh in on what I should read next!

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

I was lucky enough to grow up in an era after Title IX so I never had to worry about whether or not I could participate in the sport of my choice. For me, that sport wasn't rowing; it was swimming. Despite not ever rowing beyond banging about in a rowboat as opposed to a scull, I have always been incredibly intrigued by it. I gobbled up The Boys in the Boat and wished again that I was not too old to try to take up rowing. I know; it's never too old to learn something but I suspect that anyone seeing my rotund, short self trundling down to get in a boat with them would be flat out horrified. Instead, I just find books to feed my interest and Course Correction, Ginny Gilder's memoir about rowing, Title IX, and her Olympic dreams and experience, fit the bill for sure.

Ginny Gilder fell in love with rowing when she was sixteen and saw a race on the Charles River. Completely hooked, when she went off to Yale, she was determined to have the chance to row. Not everything in her life was as easy as that decision (and achieving that one was by no means easy either). Rowing in the age just after the passing of Title IX, Gilder's path to a rowing shell was complicated and often unhappy. She came from a terribly dysfunctional family and had an unhappy childhood she desperately wanted to escape. Finding rowing, she found something she could pour her entire heart and soul into even as she had to fight the sexism of fellow athletes and coaches, fight her own personal demons, and fight the injuries that threatened to derail her secret dream: to row in the Olympics. Then she still had to endure world politics when we boycotted the 1980 Olympics.

Starting in the 70s, this memoir is both a very personal story for Gilder and a history of what Title IX has meant for all the women who have followed its passing. It is a testament to the powerful way that sports can impact a life. Gilder's story of her quest to become an Olympian, the way she pushes her body beyond, and her fierce determination to win and to come back after an injury interweaves with her own self-realization, an awakening to who she really is, going far beyond her amazing athletic career. She traces the roots of those things that hold her back and chronicles how she first pushes past them and then circles back to examine them closely. Sometimes this introspection and examination of her self doubt slows the narrative down a little too much. It is a testament to Gilder's spirit and the many course corrections she undertook along the way that she overcame such a troubled childhood and the inertia of a life she created but that wasn't the right life to ultimately find a contentment and a mission supporting women's sports. Gilder tackles the many social issues that shaped and continue to shape her life: infidelity, alcoholism, sexism, and homosexuality to name a few. And she holds the politics of sport up to the light. This is a celebration of not only rowing and reaching her dream but of accepting her life and who she is. Sports fans and those with a keen interest in the impact of Title IX will find this a fascinating read.

Thanks to the publisher and LibraryThing Early Reviewers for sending me a copy of the book to review.

Amazon says this about the book: With the wit and pace of Anthony Bourdain, Italian chef and anthropologist Leonardo Lucarelli sketches the exhilarating life behind the closed doors of restaurants, and the unlikely work ethics of the kitchen.

In Italy, five-star restaurants and celebrity chefs may seem, on the surface, a part of the landscape. In reality, the restaurant industry is as tough, cutthroat, and unforgiving as anywhere else in the world--sometimes even colluding with the shady world of organized crime. The powerful voice of Leonardo Lucarelli takes us through the underbelly of Italy's restaurant world. Lucarelli is a professional chef who for almost two decades has been roaming Italy opening restaurants, training underpaid, sometimes hopelessly incompetent sous-chefs, courting waitresses, working long hours, riding high on drugs, and cursing a culinary passion he inherited as a teenager from his hippie father. In his debut, Mincemeat: The Education of an Italian Chef, Lucarelli teaches us that even among rogues and misfits, there is a moral code in the kitchen that must, above all else, always be upheld.

Monday, November 14, 2016

I Will Find You by Joanna Connors
A Shoe Addict's Christmas by Beth Harbison
You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
Hollywood Is a Lot Like High School With Money by Zoey Dean
Disaster Falls by Stephane Gerson

Bookmarks are still living in the middle of:

You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
The Edge of Lost by Kristina McMorris
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Different Kind of Daughter by Maria Toorpakai
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti
Roughneck Grace by Michael Perry
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Birds, Beasts, and Relatives by Gerald Durrell

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

One Perfect Summer by Paige Toon
The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth
The Sisters of Versailles by Sally Christie
The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel by Maureen Lindley
Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Forsaken by Ross Howell Jr.
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
The Spice Box Letters by Eve Makis
Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser
Specimen by Irina Kovalyova
One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Telling by Zoe Zolbrod
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
The Boy Who Speaks in Numbers by Mike Masilamani
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick
What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
After the Dam by Amy Hassinger
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Umami by Laia Jufresa
The Education of a Poker Player by James McManus
Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse
Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Remarkable by Dinah Cox
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
The Inland Sea by Donald Ritchie
The Unseen World by Liz Moore
The Silver Spoon by Kansuke Naka
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine by Alex Brunkhorst
The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith
The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter
The Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Bottomland by Michelle Hoover
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison
The Lake by Perrine Leblanc
Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
A Girl From Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
If You Left by Ashley Norton
The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller
And Again by Jessica Chiarella
Man by Kim Thuy
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood
The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora
A Good American by Alex George
Bertrand Court by Michelle Brafman
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
The Winter War by Philip Teir
This Side of Providence by Sally M. Harper
Lost and Found by Brooke Davis
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
Course Correction by Ginny Gilder
Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya
300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan
The Tsar of Love of Techno by Anthony Marra
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden
Hey Harry, Hey Matilda by Rachel Hulin
The Measure of Darkness by Liam Durcan
Finding Fraser by KC Dyer
A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold
The Drone Eats With Me by Atef Abu Saif
Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh
Moo by Sharon Creech
Dear Reader by Paul Fournel
Hotel Angeline by 36 authors
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old by Anonymous
Xenophobe's Guide to the English by Antony Miall and David Milsted
No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman
Lord Roworth's Reward by Carola Dunn
Violation by Sallie Tisdale
Fall of Poppies by a collection of authors
A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner
Sitting in Bars With Cake by Audrey Schulman
Plus One by Christopher Noxon
Aunt Dimity and the Summer King by Nancy Atherton
The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday by Debbie Graber
Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell
An Improper Arrangement by Kasey Michaels
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
Riverine by Angela Palm
Gold Fever by Steve Boggan
I Will Find You by Joanna Connors
A Shoe Addict's Christmas by Beth Harbison
You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
Hollywood Is a Lot Like High School With Money by Zoey Dean
Disaster Falls by Stephane Gerson

I really enjoy books with parallel story lines so this one about an artistic woman who has to revisit what happened to her years ago when she was a child and the parallel story of the woman who used to live in the house Wyn is caretaking should be interesting indeed.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

I really enjoyed Still Alice, Lisa Genova's novel about a woman facing early onset Alzheimer's. Her next novel, Left Neglected, about a woman suffering from the neurological condition of left neglect was another good read. When I received Love Anthony in the mail as a part of my postal mailbox book club, I was quite pleased to read a third novel of hers, this one centered on non-verbal autism. There's so little we actually know for sure about how our wonderful, amazing brains work that Genova's insights into specific functioning and the people living with the conditions or results is interesting indeed. But unlike her previous two novels, this one didn't work as well for me at all.

Beth is a married mother of three whose world comes crashing down on her when she discovers a note in the mailbox telling her that her husband Jimmy is cheating on her. She kicks him out and has to start the process of healing and of adjusting to life as a single mom. Her questions about how they got to where they did and her grief and despair are palpable in her story. Slowly she discovers that she must find the self she hid away long ago before she can consider what the future might hold. One of the things that she allowed to fall by the wayside in her marriage and motherhood is her love of writing, something she determines to reclaim even as she continues going about her daily life as a year rounder on the island of Nantucket.

Olivia has just separated from her husband and moved to Nantucket to the vacation home they once shared. She is not only mourning the loss of her marriage but she is still deeply frozen in grief over the death of her non-verbal autistic eight year old son. Anthony suffered a subdural hematoma after falling during a seizure and his loss has left her with so many questions, foremost among them whether he knew she loved him if he himself didn't have words and what the meaning of his short life was. The extreme isolation of Nantucket in the winter turns out to be a perfect place for Olivia to escape from the sorrow of Anthony's loss and the sadness that caring for him exhausted she and David so much that they couldn't find their way back together in the shared wake of his death.

While these two story lines do eventually come together, getting there took altogether too much time. Initially the parallel seems to be the women's disintegrating marriages but there's really no similarity to them at all. Of course, there's also the prologue where Beth adds a round white rock to Anthony's line of white rocks on the beach years prior, meant to convey Beth's sympathy for this unknown and clearly unusual child and perhaps lays the groundwork for a later fantastical occurrence. The narrative jumps back and forth between Beth and Olivia, with Olivia's portions also containing reminiscences of life with Anthony. Beth's portions come to include pieces of the novel she starts to write, a novel from the perspective of an autistic boy. Neither Beth nor Olivia was really all that well fleshed out as characters and the jumps in time in the narrative compressed feelings, moving Olivia and Beth along their own timelines without giving any sense of the hard work they had to be doing. Olivia's sense of alienation and her sorrow over the end of her marriage is more examined than Beth's feelings about her marriage, perhaps because David is rarely present in the narrative while Jimmy, still living and working on Nantucket, is. And if Genova hadn't gone farther, it would have been an okay but not great book centered more on marriages and how they fall apart than on autism. Instead, she uses Beth's book to turn the focus entirely. Beth writing about a child with autism without any direct experience of such didn't bother me at all. That she could so easily capture such a child without any research at all did. And the twist offered to explain this was a bridge too far.

SPOILER (highlight to read)

The parallels between the boy in Beth's book and Olivia's Anthony started small enough but soon ballooned into absurdity. That Beth was in actual fact channeling Anthony rather than writing a book of her own cheapened Beth's effort to re-connect with writing and with her former interests. In fact, it is clearly Anthony's book, not Beth's. Can she really be said to have started writing again if it is all because she is his conduit? I can certainly buy the idea that Anthony had an active internal voice and unexpressed (because of his non-verbalness) reasons for his outward actions but the passages in his voice felt contrived and inauthentic, reading more as if this is what the author hopes is true than as a true possibility. As if this isn't bad enough, the excerpted parts of Anthony's story are actually rather dull after a while and unlikely to be the kernel of a viable novel. The ending of the larger novel was a let down as well. Beth's sense that the words "you don't have the right ending yet" referred to more than just the novel was a trite about-face after all her measured thinking and hard fought conclusion about her marriage to Jimmy. Maybe getting back together with him was the "right ending" but it was too easy and too unexplained after all that went before it. Olivia's ending was equally easy and unearned. As for Anthony's final letter presented in the epilogue, call me heartless, but I felt manipulated rather than satisfied but maybe this was residual annoyance with what had gone before.

END SPOILER

Obviously this had major problems for me and I'm sorry for that because I wanted to be amazed. Maybe the problem was that Genova had to channel her most interesting character (Anthony) and his thoughts through another character rather than him telling his own story, all of his own story, through his perspective. Having Anthony dead for the entire narrative made it more obvious the toll it can take caring for a child like him, who needs so much that giving to a spouse and even keeping a sense of yourself, is wildly difficult, but it also meant far less of him, his thinking, and the daily life he led in a world not designed for him. The subject of autism is a fascinating one and I wish this had delivered on it so much more than I felt it did. On the other hand, there are many rave reviews of the book so you might want to discount my opinion entirely!

Amazon says this about the book: From the author of Summer at Hideaway Key comes a sweeping new Southern women’s fiction novel about forgiving the past one letter at a time...

The truth lies between the lines...

A year ago, Dovie Larkin’s life was shattered when her fiancé committed suicide just weeks before their wedding. Now, plagued by guilt, she has become a fixture at the cemetery where William is buried, visiting his grave daily, waiting for answers she knows will never come.

Then one day, she sees an old woman whose grief mirrors her own. Fascinated, she watches the woman leave a letter on a nearby grave. Dovie ignores her conscience and reads the letter—a mother’s plea for forgiveness to her dead daughter—and immediately needs to know the rest of the story.

As she delves deeper, a collection of letters from the cemetery’s lost and found begins to unravel a decades-old mystery involving one of Charleston’s wealthiest families. But even as Dovie seeks to answer questions about another woman’s past—questions filled with deception, betrayal, and heartbreaking loss—she starts to discover the keys to love, forgiveness, and finally embracing the future…

Monday, November 7, 2016

I first read Mag Cabot when she started putting out her Princess Diaries books. I read them along with my then young daughter and we both thoroughly enjoyed the sweet, fairy tale of discovering you are royalty. Cabot then went on to break into the world of adult fiction but I didn't really follow along, consumed as I was with other reading obligations. When I saw this latest of Cabot's chick lit romances, I decided I needed to see if she captures the adult world as well as she did the awkward teenaged ugly duckling world. Not quite but still mostly enjoyable.

When the most prominent citizens in small Bloomville, Indiana, Judge and Mrs. Stewart, are arrested for dining and ditching at a local restaurant, the story is set in motion. That they didn't truly dine and ditch but tried to pay their bill with a stamp they thought was worth $400 but was actually only worth $4, suggests that there's something more troubling going on than the surface suggests and their three grown children are going to have to intervene. This means that PGA tour pro Reed Stewart is going to have to come back to town. He's been gone for 10 years, after an incident on prom night with his girlfriend Becky Flowers caused a rupture in the family. Becky has stayed in town, inheriting her family's moving business and becoming a specialist in moving seniors. The Stewart children hire Moving Up!, Becky's company, to help their parents transition out of their long time home. And this means that Becky will come face to face with Reed, her first love. As Becky tackles the hoarding in the Stewart's once beautiful, now deteriorating, home, she and Reed banter back and forth, eventually discovering the extent of the Stewarts' surprising and hidden financial problems even as they try to decide if they should allow a rekindling of their feelings for each other.

The novel is told completely through texts, emails, online product feedback, new articles, and Becky's blessings journal. It definitely captures the way we communicate with each other today. But this formatting also highlights the superficial nature of so many of our interactions with each other. The depth of feeling of a more traditional narrative is lacking and even the larger issues brought up here, taking financial advantage of seniors, failing parental expectations, eccentricity versus a sign of something more sinister, are all dealt with on a very surface level. In fact, what is presaged to be a sad mental deterioration turns out to be nothing at all, which is frustrating for the reader. The Stewart family is dysfunctional but they are entertaining to read about, especially brother Marshall and his wife Carly. Sister Trimble is definitely less appealing as a character and less present in the story. Reed's siblings, Becky's best friend and sister, and Becky's wine shop owning, cheesemonger lumbersexual boyfriend are all a treat. The end is never in doubt and the smallish mystery is no mystery to the reader. The overall predictability is a little disappointing and I'm not entirely sold on a novel told exclusively through social media but, in general, this ends up being a cute, fluffy, and easy read.

Well, I resorted back to not doing much reviewing but I also didn't do a truckload of reading this week. I spent a lot of time rescuing the hedgehog my daughter and her friends had at college, taking said hedgehog to the emergency vet, and buying said hedgehog (who hisses at me and bites me--just me, btw, not anyone else) things to make his existence more pleasant. Add in Halloween and my parents arriving for a short visit, mainly to pick up their dog who I was dog sitting, and I just haven't managed to find time for anything. ::sigh:: This meme is hosted by Kathryn at Reading Date.

You Have Never Been Here by Mary Rickert
West With the Night by Beryl Markham
A Well-Made Bed by Abby Frucht and Laurie Alberts
The Other Woman by Therese Bohman
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer
The Lake House by Kate Morton
Exposure by Helen Dunmore
I Will Find You by Joanna Connors
The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel
Eliza Waite by Ashley E. Sweeney
Shelter by Jung Yun
The Center of the World by Jacqueline Sheehan
The Edge of Lost by Kristina McMorris
A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The Last Time She Saw Him by Jane Haseldine
The Beauty of the End by Debbie Howells
I Hid My Voice by Parinoush Saniee
Country of Red Azaleas by Domnica Radulescu
A Different Kind of Daughter by Maria Toorpakai
A Hard and Heavy Thing by Matthew J. Hefti

Reviews posted this week:

none

Books still needing to have reviews written (as opposed to the ones that are simply awaiting posting):

One Perfect Summer by Paige Toon
The Things We Keep by Sally Hepworth
The Sisters of Versailles by Sally Christie
The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel by Maureen Lindley
Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
American Housewife by Helen Ellis
The Two-Family House by Lynda Cohen Loigman
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton
Closer All the Time by Jim Nichols
The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Forsaken by Ross Howell Jr.
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
The Spice Box Letters by Eve Makis
Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman
A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser
Specimen by Irina Kovalyova
One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Telling by Zoe Zolbrod
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
The Boy Who Speaks in Numbers by Mike Masilamani
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick
What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
After the Dam by Amy Hassinger
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
Umami by Laia Jufresa
The Education of a Poker Player by James McManus
Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse
Mrs. Engels by Gavin McCrea
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Remarkable by Dinah Cox
Miss Jane by Brad Watson
The Inland Sea by Donald Ritchie
The Unseen World by Liz Moore
The Silver Spoon by Kansuke Naka
Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett
The Gilded Life of Matilda Duplaine by Alex Brunkhorst
The Honeymoon by Dinitia Smith
The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter
The Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum
Bottomland by Michelle Hoover
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison
The Lake by Perrine Leblanc
Orhan's Inheritance by Aline Ohanesian
A Girl From Yamhill by Beverly Cleary
If You Left by Ashley Norton
The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller
And Again by Jessica Chiarella
Man by Kim Thuy
The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood
The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende
The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora
A Good American by Alex George
Bertrand Court by Michelle Brafman
When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams
The Winter War by Philip Teir
This Side of Providence by Sally M. Harper
Lost and Found by Brooke Davis
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
Course Correction by Ginny Gilder
Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya
300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan
The Tsar of Love of Techno by Anthony Marra
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick
The Book of Harlan by Bernice L. McFadden
Hey Harry, Hey Matilda by Rachel Hulin
The Measure of Darkness by Liam Durcan
Finding Fraser by KC Dyer
A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold
The Drone Eats With Me by Atef Abu Saif
Heat and Light by Jennifer Haigh
Moo by Sharon Creech
Dear Reader by Paul Fournel
Hotel Angeline by 36 authors
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old by Anonymous
Xenophobe's Guide to the English by Antony Miall and David Milsted
No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman
Lord Roworth's Reward by Carola Dunn
Violation by Sallie Tisdale
Fall of Poppies by a collection of authors
A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner
Sitting in Bars With Cake by Audrey Schulman
Plus One by Christopher Noxon
Aunt Dimity and the Summer King by Nancy Atherton
The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday by Debbie Graber
Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell
An Improper Arrangement by Kasey Michaels
Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll
The Boy Is Back by Meg Cabot
Riverine by Angela Palm
Love Anthony by Lisa Genova
Gold Fever by Steve Boggan

I am very curious to read a memoir based around Hughes and the movies he made, movies that populated my teen life just as they did the author's, although I never set out to write a biography of Hughes like Diamond did. This sounds like it should be so relatable and fascinating.

If you want to see the marvelous goodies in other people's mailboxes, make sure to visit Mailbox Monday and have fun seeing how we are all doing our part to keep the USPS and delivery services viable.

Sunday, November 6, 2016

If you're a book person, you've noticed that publishing tends to have trends. The trends can be titles (e.g. anything with Girl in it), cover images (for a while there were legs on every other cover, then it was either the lower third of a woman's face, a woman's face in silhouette, or a woman from behind), fonts (e.g. art deco type fonts), or the subject matter of the story (WWII anyone?). The trend that I've noticed right now is a different one though. It's the trend of writing about senior citizens. And it's an interesting trend not only because we are all lapping up these tales of rebelling (often, anyway) wrinklies, but because this is a portion of the population that is generally unseen. We pop our older people into retirement homes or assisted living places. We discount their wisdom and experience, only ever imagining they have been old (a sort of euphemism for doddering ineffectiveness) forever. And we paint them as one dimensional, forgetting that there's really nothing new under the sun, at least as far as human nature goes, and they beat us to everything non-technological that we think we're inventing. So bringing them into the spotlight in fiction and non-fiction in such numbers, making them the stars of their own show, so to speak, is fascinating.

Many years ago I read Out to Pasture by Effie Leland Wilder. It's novel about a woman living in a retirement home who chronicles the lives of the other residents and was written by an octogenarian. I found it charming and unusual and I went on to read the rest of the series. It seemed completely original to me when I found it in 1995 and I have always remembered it fondly. So in the past several years when publishing seemed to see the charm and potential in stories written about oldies, I was happy to ride along. A friend I rely on for reading recommendations handed me A Man Called Ove in hard cover and raved about this "grumpy old man" book. I, and much of the rest of the reading public, ate it up. Ove started what I think of as the sort of caper version of these older protagonist stories. They center on an older person misbehaving, or at least not behaving like we expect the elderly to behave. In recent years I've read quite a few of these books: George's Grand Tour, The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen 83 1/4 Years Old, and The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules just to name a few. While these books have been lighthearted and sweet, they have also touched on harder, deeper subjects as well. In a gentle and mostly entertaining way, they've shone a light on issues that will one day effect all of us: the maginalization and invisibility of the aging and the elderly.

Not all of the fiction about this portion of the population centers on mischief and antics though. Some of it is more focused on the more political: the usefulness of the aged, love and companionship in later years, and the right of people of all ages to make their own decisions, to direct their own lives. The Unit, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, and Our Souls at Night are just some of the more recent thoughtful and beautifully written books that look seriously at these aspects of aging. Even without the obvious humor of the caper type stories, this trio and others like them show the vitality and importance of those in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. Their protagonists are more than capable of expressing strong emotions and of wanting to live their own lives, indeed, to finish those lives on their own terms.

Non-fiction accounts of the elderly tend to focus on the end of life and on the children who are their caretakers. These do address the reality of aging but are often more about the impact of decline on those who love them than on the people themselves. If they look backwards to a time before, it is almost always about the relationship they had with the child now taking care of them in their final years. Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Bettyville, and The Bridge Ladies are just some of the fairly recent entries into this unflinching look at aging.

How long this trend of older or elderly people as main character will last, I don't know. But while it does last, I am enjoying it, enjoying being reminded of the verve and spark, the very humanity of people who deserve to be seen even when we might want to close our eyes to the fact of mortality and all of our inevitable ends. I want to acknowledge the poignancy and the mischievousness and everything else too though. I still have a couple of books that will do for this on my shelves or on my wish list: The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared and The Heart of Henry Quantum. Are there more that I'm missing? Let me know!

This week my reading travels didn't take me very far at all. I went along with a woman looking back at her past and the boy/man she once loved who ended up in a very different place than she did. I was on Nantucket as a mother grieved the death of her autistic son and the loss of her marriage while another woman contemplated the loss of her own identity in the wake of her husband's infidelity. And now I am in California during the modern day Gold Rush as well as learning about the historical event that preceded it. Where did your reading travels take you this past week?

Amazon says this about the book: EUGENIA PANISPORCHI LIVES WITH HER MOTHER, TEACHES CHAUCER, AND REMEMBERS ALL HER PAST LIVES. SHE IS DESPERATE TO CHANGE HER FUTURE.

Born this time around into a South Philadelphia Italian-American family so traditional, she and her siblings are expected to marry in birth order, Eugenia lives a simple life―no love connection, no controversy, no complications. Her hope is that the Blessed Virgin Mary (who oversees her soul's progress) will grant her heart's desire, the option to choose the circumstances of her next life. But when a student reveals he shares her ability, Eugenia suddenly finds herself setting up a Facebook page and sponsoring a support group for others like her, an oddball odyssey, during which she discovers she must confront her current shortcomings before she can break the cycle and finally live the life of her dreams.

A layered contemporary fable, Hindsight reminds us to live this life like it's the only one we'll have.

Pages

About Me

A voracious reader, fledgling runner, and full time kiddie chauffeur.
If anyone out there wants to send me books for review (oh please don't fro me in that briar patch!), you can contact me at whitreidsmama (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you do write me there, put the blog name in the subject line or I'm liable to send the unread message to spam. My book review policy can be found here.